The WAVE: Success Charter Is Reason Suspension Program Moving to Beach Channel Campus

School Scope’s Norm Scott charges that Success Academt founder Eva Moskowitz is “a politically connected and aggressive charter school leader, who closes her schools and uses the kids, parents and teachers as a political tool.”
 
My April 1 column in The WAVE - page 4.

http://www.rockawave.com/news/2016-04-01/School_News/Success_Charter_Is_Reason_Suspension_Program_Movin.html

Success Charter Is Reason Suspension Program Moving to BCEC

School Scope

By Norm Scott

 
 

Both Rockaway papers had major stories last week about the move of a suspension program out of IS 53 into Beach Channel Campus. Neither paper pointed to the connection to the incoming politically connected Success Academy charter as the reason.

Former Wave editor Howie Schwach was on the case on his
OnRockaway website:

Program for troubled teens coming to Channel Campus; Goldfeder wants study: Coming soon to Rockaway’s Beach Channel Educational Campus a program that will bring 150 hard core students, suspended from their schools for such transgressions as setting fires, assaulting staff and other students, using a weapon on school grounds and the like. The program, now running at IS 53 will soon be moved because space in that school is needed for a new Eva Moskowitz Success Charter School.

My only complaint is that Howie didn’t call her Evil.

I had to laugh at the headline. Phil, who supports charter schools, wants a study when the answer is right in front of his face.
Moskowitz is a politically connected and aggressive charter school leader, who closes her schools and uses the kids, parents and teachers as a political tool, and always gets what she wants. She did not want her precious “scholars,” who have been known to pee in their pants in terror, to have to be in the same building with kids, in Schwach’s words “who have gone the school suspension route a number of times or who have committed offenses that fall in the high end of the city’s Discipline Code, level four or five offenses such as assault, bringing a weapon to school or setting a fire. Violations such as those go to a Superintendent’s Suspension, which can bring time out ranging from a month to a full year.”

There was no accident that the socalled “hearing” was held on St. Patrick’s Day. The DOE and Mayor Bill de Blasio live in fear of Eva and know full well that if they did not move the suspension program millions of dollars of ads might appear charging him with endangering her children.

How about Phil joining many others around the city in calling for a study of the disciplinary practices at Success Charters?

I did find all three reports in the Rockaway press seeming to feel moving the program to Beach Channel out of IS 53 and into Beach Channel is a bad thing. What about all the students at IS 53 which has been living with the program so far? What have been the outcomes there? And what about these troubled kids under suspension? Do we abandon them? What exactly is the solution? A site outside a school setting? Where?

Howie reports there are 38 sites with one in each district for the District 88 Alternative Learning Sites, so there are 38 schools with the same program. If these kids are dangerous no matter what school they are in requires proper security and more importantly, counseling services for these students.

Rockaway politicians must delve deeper into the issues affecting all students and not just jump on bandwagons.

Don’t forget. Sunshine Boys opens April 1 at the Rockaway Theatre Company at Fort Tilden.
Norm blogs at ednoteonline.org.

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